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At some point in the future, perhaps, we’ll look back at the Trump presidency with some sense of perspective. For now, though, as we’re in the midst of it, it’s just one weird thing after another. And with each new, unseemly tweet or attempted put down, it becomes more and more apparent that there is a significant disconnect between the President and his supporters and at least some of the rest of us.

The President’s various petty feuds with members of the news media are the best example of this phenomenon. Every day, the President seems to become locked into some bitter dispute with a TV show host or a network. His crude, mean tweets about the hosts of the Morning Joe show on MSNBC are strange because you’d expect the President to be able to remain above the fray. Surely the President has bigger things to deal with, right? And, even if he did feel the need to respond to the comments of a particular broadcaster, couldn’t he do so in a fashion that doesn’t involve referring to somebody’s purported plastic surgery? Wouldn’t most Presidents conclude that very few people out in the country watch, or are even aware of, Morning Joe and therefore responding to its hosts can only call attention to what they are saying?

I’ve always considered Kathy Griffin to be an unfunny, no-talent hack who always seems to be willing to do or say anything in a desperate bid to get some attention. Calling her a “comedian” is an insult to people who have a legitimate sense of humor and make people laugh for a living.

So it was no surprise to me that Griffin did something stupidly provocative — in this case, posing for a photo with a mock-up of a bloody, severed head of Donald Trump — in a bid to try to remain “edgy” and in the news. The fact that anyone, even a pathetic attention grubber like Griffin, would think that posing with the severed head of the President of the United States was funny, tells you something about how out of touch some people can be with prevailing human sensibilities.

What’s encouraging, though, is the reaction to Griffin’s photo. She was universally criticized by everyone, left and right, liberal and conservative, irrespective of whether they support Trump or think he’s the worst President ever. Griffin also was, not surprisingly, removed from gigs and jobs, including participating in the CNN New Year’s Eve show that I’ve never watched, because someone who thought, even for a second, that that kind of photo was funny is obviously so lacking in judgment that she’s capable of doing or saying other things that are grossly inappropriate.

The broad condemnation of Griffin’s ill-advised publicity stunt shows that we still have some standards of propriety in this country. To be sure, drawing the line at posing for a photograph with the President’s head may be a low bar, but it’s nevertheless nice to know that the bar is still there.

Trying to reposition yourself as the victim is a classic, last-ditch tactic when you’ve done something so colossally wrong-headed, so it’s no surprise that Griffin is trying it. It will be interesting to see whether anyone lets Griffin get away with it, when in reality she has only herself to blame for her witless, self-inflicted injury.

Couple the military maneuvers with a few presidential summits with foreign leaders like the Chinese head of state and the president of Egypt, and you’ve also got a lot of people talking about Donald Trump looking “presidential.” Of course, Presidents always are said to look “presidential” when they are dealing with foreign policy or ordering military action; that’s because those are areas where the President can act unilaterally, without having to try to convince balky Congresses to take one action or another. It’s been a time-honored technique of the residents of the Oval Office for decades — if you’ve had a rough time on your domestic agenda, have a foreign leader over for a visit or try to shift the focus to the actions of a “rogue state” or “terrorist threat.” So, whether through careful planning or happenstance, Donald Trump is following a well-thumbed presidential playbook.

It’s interesting that we frequently associate ordering military action and foreign policy positioning with looking “presidential,” because in doing so we’re really encouraging Presidents to spend their time on those areas rather than focusing on the domestic issues that never seem to get addressed and actually trying to convince Congress to do something about those nagging problems. How many Presidents, deep in their heart of hearts, have been tempted to engage in a little sabre-rattling or to lob a few missiles at a terrorist encampment or an air base to shift the focus of national attention and raise their approval ratings a few points?

Donald Trump isn’t the first President to receive the “looking presidential” kudos, and he probably won’t be the last, either. But the association of military action and photo ops with foreign leaders with “looking presidential” troubles me. Wouldn’t we rather incentivize our Presidents to focus on fixing what’s gone wrong in this country, and reserve the highest, gushing “looking presidential” praise for when the President does what the Constitution contemplates, and signs domestic legislation that has passed both Houses of Congress into law?

Here’s a surprise: Congress is mired in disputes about the new legislation that is supposed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (or at least claims to do something to deal with the ongoing problems with President Obama’s signature legislation). There was supposed to be a vote on the legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday, but the tally got postponed over concerns that the legislation might fail.

It’s an interesting approach, and I suspect that it comes from Trump’s years of working in the business world. Corporations typically don’t engage in open-ended negotiations, allowing events to marinate and slowly come together — which often seems to be how Congress works (if you believe that Congress works at all). Instead, because there’s a time value to money and limits to corporate resources that can be expended on potential deals that don’t materialize, corporations set establish priorities, set deadlines, and push. Once a deadline gets set, it becomes another means of applying pressure to the parties to reach an agreement, and if the deal doesn’t get done by the deadline, typically that takes the transaction off the table, the corporation moves on, and there is no going back.

Trump’s approach to this legislative test is, obviously, also informed by political considerations; he wants to set a deadline so members of Congress are actually forced to do something concrete, and we don’t have the lingering story of “what’s going to happen to Obamacare” attracting all of the media attention and detracting from the other things he’s trying to accomplish. It’s a gamble, because if the legislation Trump is backing doesn’t pass, he could be painted as a failure in the early months of his Administration, making it less likely that he’ll be able to obtain passage of other parts of his agenda, like tax reform. We already knew that Trump is a gambler, of course — his whole campaign was a bizarre, otherworldly gamble that paid off. Now he’s bringing some of that high-stakes, business world approach to the legislative political realm.

We shouldn’t be surprised, by now, that Trump is going to continue to gamble and continue to do things in confounding ways. Today we’ll get another lesson in whether his approach can actually work in Washington, D.C., even on a short term basis.

It’s a messy story, and we’ll have to see whether we learn anything further about the source of the leak. For now, I hold to two basic points: (1) if Trump didn’t approve the leak and somebody in the federal government (specifically, the IRS) leaked the two pages of the 2005 return to advance their own personal political agenda, that is both illegal and a grossly inappropriate intrusion into Trump’s personal information and should be opposed by anyone, regardless of their political views, who has entrusted the government with their confidential information, via tax returns or otherwise; and (2) the returns show why presidential candidates should release their returns and why, if they object to such a release, voters should insist that they do so. The 2005 returns indicate that Trump paid millions of dollars pursuant to the alternative minimum tax — a tax that Trump has talked about abolishing. The public deserves to know whether political positions are motivated by a politician’s own self interest.

If there’s one sport that I would associate with our new President, it’s Nascar.

Both Nascar drivers and Donald Trump like ballcaps with printed messages. Both Nascar and the new President like to throw in the random commercial plug here and there. Both Nascar drivers and Donald Trump need a lot of help from their pit crews. And both Nascar and Trump appeal to older, rural white voters. It’s no surprise that, last year, one of the Nascar execs endorsed Trump for President.

So it seems like a counterintuitive cultural disconnect that, with Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, Nascar is really struggling — but that’s the case. Ratings for Nascar broadcasts have been cut almost in half since 2005. Racetrack owners have torn down sections of bleachers at their tracks due to declining attendance, but the remaining stands still aren’t filled. TV executives are pushing the sport to make dramatic changes to reverse the decline. And, according to the linked article, even with two years’ notice Nascar wasn’t able to find a new primary sponsor that was willing to pay its asking price and it therefore had to sell the sponsorship and naming rights on the cheap.

Why is Nascar on the downslope? The article gets into a lot of inside baseball talk, but I think the reality is simple: it’s boring to watch cars driving around a race track for hundreds of miles, no matter how garishly painted they might be and how many product stickers they might sport. I’ve never understood Nascar’s appeal for that central reason — and the generations coming behind mine, growing up with Walkmans and cell phones and social media, apparently have even less of an attention span than I do. When Nascar people are talking about installing wifi at the racetracks, that tells you all you need to know about the future of the sport. People just aren’t willing to sit in the stands for hours, drinking beer and hoping for some aggressive driving on the turns and an exciting crash now and then. Changing the rules of the races and trying to come up with nicknames that make the drivers more interesting aren’t going to change that central reality.

It would be weird if the term of President Donald Trump saw Nascar once again relegated to the status of a small, regional sport — but that may be the direction in which we’re heading.

Playing golf used to be viewed as a kind of politics-free space. Celebrities, comedians, movie stars, and sports figures could hit the links with Presidents, Governors, Senators, and Congressmen without being accused of endorsing their political views. But it wasn’t just American politics that weren’t transported to the golf course, either. Gary Player was a beloved player in America and elsewhere, even though he hailed from South Africa during its apartheid era. And golfers freely played in international competitions without people trying to ban them because their home countries enforced repressive policies or weren’t viewed as sufficiently following the prevailing political views of the day. The golf course was a kind of sanctuary where people could just play golf.

And this was true even at the local level, where people playing in club tournaments or outings might detest the views of the people they’re paired with — but they play with them anyway, and treat them cordially and in the spirit of friendly competition. It’s one of the great things about golf.

It’s just too bad that the concepts of tolerance and sportsmanship and getting away from the hurly-burly of the world while you’re out on the course aren’t shared by more people who apparently must view everything through a political lens, and hold everyone to rigid standards of acceptable political behavior. When somebody can’t go out and just play golf with the President without getting ripped as a turncoat, it’s a sad statement.